Another weekend gone by and another bunch of movies consumed. Don’t know why but my weekends over the past month or so have been totally unproductive. Just been lying in my way too comfortable soffa flipping around channels. Feels like I’m in a holding pattern but atleast now I know what I’m waiting for – start of the F1 season and my new computer! Anyway, some movie reviews:
Ghost Ship : This movie made the same mistake as “Cube” and “Saving Private Ryan” – starting off with a bloody scene that made you wish you hadn’t bought those popcorns, or in my case, the pizza. But it was one predictable movie. But I don’t feel I wasted my time…
Billy Elliot : This one was so hyped when it came out and there were talks of Oscars, so my expectations were high. And I was pretty disappointed. Good movie, nice story but nothing spectacular or anything. And it kinda reminded me about two big regrets I have about my childhood, but that’s a story for another update.
Driven : Sly (who wrote and produced this flic) tried to do for car racing what Rocky did for boxing. And failed. I’m a F1 fan so I should like a movie like this, even if it features the CART series… but I didn’t. Again predictable. Awful dialogue. Awful CGI effects. Awful in the “yeah, that’d happen!” category. And the acting… let’s just say supermodel Estella’s acting was the bright star in that area! But one thing I really, REALLY enjoyed was the music!
Enemy at the Gates : Again a way too hyped movie. It wasn’t a waste of time, but it wasn’t revolutionary either. Thankfully I’m a fan of Rachel Weisz and Ed Harris otherwise it might have been a waste of time.
Scent of a Woman : This movie I saw on the big screen when it came out and again on sunday. I’ve never really liked Al Pacino or his acting that much, or Chris O’Donnell for that matter. But I love the moral points of the movie. And all the tributes to how wonderfully beautiful women are, especially Gabrielle Anwar!
Here’s hoping I get my new computer this week so my next weekend will be more productive…
The secret seems to be out now so I guess I can talk about it – a couple I’m pretty good friends with are getting divorced. “So what, that happens all the time”, right? Well, it’s the first time it’s “happened” to someone I know, and the most frightening thing is that everyone, including me, thought they were such a perfect cute couple and were great together. So I was completely shocked when she told me. ‘Cause if they split up… it can “happen” to anyone, it’s like “noone is safe”! And for me, being the practical kind of person I am, a divorce is a practical nightmare.
Is it ok for guys to have mood swings? I know women do, that’s more or less given and not uncommon, no biggy. But guys? I had terrible mood swings yesterday, I couldn’t decide if I was my normal happy self or totally pissed off at everything that went against me. And when I’m pissed off I’m not fun to be around! So “not fun” that I even felt I had to apologise for it today… and the weird thing is… I’m told it’s not uncommon for me to be unpredictable like that???
Still recovering from an awesome house warming party I attended on saturday night. I was a little bit hesitant about attending because I probably wouldn’t know that many people there so I didn’t think I’d be there that long. But I was so wrong, met some people I haven’t seen in ages, and got to know a few other people (including another “South Park” fan who considers “BASEketball” as one of the greatest movies ever). And I had so much fun that time just flew by and when I woke up on sunday morning I did my usual “check the cab-receipt for the timestamp so I know when I got home”-routine. I got home at about half past three. Let’s just say sunday turned out to be a very unproductive day for me! ‘Cause I’m not 20 any more…
One problem however, it seems that I left some room for misinterpretation as to my opinion about Christina Aguliera. My friend’s girlfriend was giving me a hard time because she thought I actually liked Aguliera… and here I thought I had made it clear I didn’t, not after “Beautiful”…
The other day I did something asshole-ish. Something very inappropriate, something that everyone else hates when people do, something I would hate if someone did. But I just had to try it, just this once! I was queuing going home in my car from work late an afternoon and it was a total gridlock over at Gullmarsplan. Then I hear sirens behind me and an ambulance comes pretty fast. Naturually I make way and let it pass me and then something just snaps and I play “chase the ambulance”, just to see how far I could safely do it! I don’t know if there is any law prohibiting such behaviour? But I wasn’t speeding and I didn’t run any red lights so it might have been totally legal. After 3 minutes a second ambulance came so I had to give up the chase, but by that time I had made up for atleast 15 minutes of just standing still!
I had a pretty funny update for today. But I barely made it into the office until I didn’t feel like being funny today. I got some disturbing news. Disturbing in the way that it upset my entire reality! My reality has included some undeniable facts like sky is blue, water is wet, women are impossible, Moby makes great music, everyone who is married is happy with that, Natalie Portman is beautiful, Formula 1 is fun no matter what anyone else says, Eminem is a bad role model, and so on. Today I got news that atleast one of them is false (and at the same time re-confirmed another one!). Unfortunately I can’t get into details for a while, but I just don’t feel like being funny even though it’s at times like this you really should try to shake it off with humor.
Perhaps I was a bit too egoistical (is that a word?) in my comment that 2003 can’t be any worse than 2002. ‘Cause let’s face it – some good things did came out of 2002! Like T&J who had their first baby! As did S&J (I know alot of J’s!). And M&L finally got married. And Ferrari won the F1 championship. And Djurgården won the football championship. And alot of other great things surely happened that I’m either not aware of or simply forgot.
Because 2002 will for me be sadly remembered because of the fact that I lost my best friend as well as lost control of my finances. And for the swedish fiasco in the winter olympics. And for Djurgårdens fiasco in the hockey championship. And my harddrives crashing resulting in me losing years of e-mail correspondence. And some other things I’ve probably suppressed. And that’s not like me to focus on the negative. Although I’m pretty good at it, but I don’t like it. I prefer to think of the good things.
But that’s why 2002 will be sadly remember – I can’t focus on the positive events… Call me an egoistical pessimist if you like…
I finally did it and became a blood donor, and don’t I feel good about it?… actually I didn’t feel a thing, I was expecting to go all dizzy and stuff afterwards. But I guess to draw a little blood out of this 110 kilo body has little effect. And I found out my blood type was 0 positive, that’s more than I knew about myself!
And for those of you keeping count – my car is in for repairs for the fourth time in less than a year. And the funny thing is I haven’t caused any of the damage or anything! And I didn’t even wanna have a car! And can you start five sentences in a row with “and” or is there a rule against it?
Wanna hear some more argument to the theory that the God of Joy has it in for me? Here goes, follow with me here because it involves three people. First it’s Britney Spears. As you might have picked up over the past two years I don’t like her. Or rather I don’t like the product Spears, I can’t really say I dis-like her since I don’t know the woman, although I do feel a little bit sorry for her because of all the bad publicity and almost witch hunt like stuff that was happening over 2002. But she’s kinda been the symbol towards my arguing that it seems more important these days in the music business to put on a good show rather than make good music. Because let’s face it, if it wasn’t for her looks she probably wouldn’t be as big as she is.
Which brings us to number two, the person who is the totally opposite to that – Moby! Although I certainly enjoyed his concert, he puts most of his effort in making good music rather than good shows. And he never plays on his looks either, and he’s a really deep and open person (just check out his journals on Moby.com) with a great sense of humor.
Another thing about Moby is that he has over the past years had a New Years party that’s been totally weird and different, and one person that has loyally attended them is person number three – Natalie Portman. Did you know they were an item, for a very short (but from Moby’s statement very intense!) time? I’ve always had great respect for Natalie, thought she’s been one of the greatest female rolemodels since Lady Di. A woman who cared more about graduating from Harvard than to make movies (=money).
So why am I going on about this? Because Natalie gave in to the dark side and teamed up with Britney to host a New Years party of their own!!! What are the odds that a woman I had so much respect for teams up with a woman I have so little respect for to compete against the dude I have the greatest respect for? There must have been some kind of divined intervention involved there.
The spontaneous answer to the question “why am I still single” will probably be related to my lack of good looks or lack of gym-time, rather than my personality. But this new year I was faced with the personality-related problem I have – my incredible reluctance to taking the initiative with women! It’s a real problem I have that I just can’t take the initiative. During the little party at my sister’s, a friend of theirs showed up, totally ok in all departments (as far as I could tell), and what do I do?…. nothing! Although it probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere (’cause she tried to make me wear a tie and you know how I feel about that), and she probably wasn’t interested anyway, but the thing is I never bothered finding out. So if there’s one thing in my personality that I wish I could just change that’d probably be it…
Just a quick not before I’m out of here (as I’m watching the fireworks in Sydney) – Happy new year! And all things considering, it can’t get much worse than 2002 can it?
Ok, I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting this place over the holidays. I’ve been away for a couple of days during Christmas, and then I’ve just been totally relaxing while not doing much at all. Actually I’ve been watching alot of movies over the past week. Like the hilarious “Fat Greek Wedding” and today I finally saw the latest Bond flic (which I really enjoyed) but I’ll wait until Wednesday to see the new Lord of The Rings quite simply because I saw the first one on the 1st of January.
And tomorrow I’ll be going to my sis and her hubby for a new years party so if I don’t get to update tomorrow here’s wishing you a happy new year!!!
Puh, that was a busy week! Except all the work at work, and being on-call and actually called in, I’ve been totally busy writing a new revolutionary section on NataliePortman.com.. revolutionary for us anyway 🙂
Which reminds me of that funny joke most of you didn’t get (“select * from users where clue>0”), this is the end result of what I’ve been doing:
“SELECT ARTICLE_ID, DATE_FORMAT(DATE, ‘%M %D, %Y’) as FDATUM, PUBLICATION, COUNTRY, LANGUAGE, AUTHOR, TITLE, ROUND(RATING_POINTS/RATING_VOTES, 1) as RATING, RATING_VOTES, SYNOPSIS FROM articles WHERE $wherelan $wheremedia $wheretype $orderby1 $orderby2 LIMIT $limitvalue, $limit”
Yeah, it may look easy but it took a week!
Anyway, onto something much nicer – last minute Christmas-shopping! I realised on Thursday that I still haven’t bought the presents for the grown-up part of our family so I had to find some time to do that. And since I’m working on Monday I planned it for Saturday. I expected half of stockholm to do the same, but thanks to the fact that I got in early I missed most of the crowds. And there was this one things that I thought was pretty funny.. an elderly man and his wife going around the hippest CD store with the list of things for their teenage grand-daughter and trying to pronounce “INXS” to the clerk.. something funny yet sweet about that whole scenario 🙂
Do you know what my biggest problem in school was? It wasn’t being in the lower social rank, it wasn’t the teachers, it wasn’t the fellow students, it wasn’t what we were reading – it was the fact I couldn’t concentrate on reading more than a couple of pages at a time! I don’t know why this is, but whenever I pick up a book I can only read 6 or 7 pages before I either have to do something else or my eyelids will close! It doesn’t matter what it is I’m reading, if it’s boring or exciting, same result! This was a huge problem back then, but for some reason I have no problem reading pages and pages of stuff on a computer screen. This has led to my not reading that many books. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve read more than maybe 5 books – willingly! And some pretentious people have looked down on me because of this little fact that I don’t read books.
So why am I boring you with this information? Because I want you to understand the story behind the recent mystery – why do I rock in Scrabble – IN ENGLISH?!! Seriously – when playing against my Scottish born mother, my sister who has lived over there for years and have a Scottish husband, my father who has travelled the world for years and also married an english speaking person, when faced with that opposition, how can I win?! I don’t get it, but I did it again – TWICE! And in that last round, when my sister and ‘brother’ realised I was leading they even did a team-move to beat me (he did a 42 point word that she challenged to he would get double points!), and failed (because “infirmed” wasn’t in the dictionary!)! There must be something wrong because I’m not that good in these kind of social games! With the exception of Trivial Pursuit, I suck at them! So with my reading problem and the handicap of never living in an english speaking country, how can I win in this game!? I don’t get it…
After yesterday’s update you may be thinking “how can you be a single, sexually active guy in the most babified city in the world, and not get atleast one HIV test!? If not for your sake than atleast for your partner’s!”. And you’d be right too, and I’m usually the first person to tell people how irresponsible it is not to use a condom. But that’s just it – I do! And always have. I’ve even taken a raincheck once due to lack of one. With the one exception of the first time (I was not totally sober, it wasn’t planned, she was calling the shots and I didn’t have one nearby). But that’s all it takes right, just one time? And that’s when I started getting worried until I all of a sudden realised – I did get a blood analysis a couple of months after that trip to Kenya. So I’m not worried anymore. What’s my point? – always use a condom and always have one nearby! And if you have really good friends/family, they’ll give you one on your 25th birthday… ok, you had to be there to appreciate the joke…
In this dark time of my life (the sun sets between 3 and 4 now!) when I’m totally broke I still found a way to contribute to charity – I’ve finally become a blood donor! Well, technically I haven’t actually donated any blood yet, they just took samples to make sure I’m not dying of something that could affect my blood. And so it hit me – I haven’t had a medical checkup for years, must be about 15 years ago or something! So I’m kinda nervous if they’re gonna find something.
So give it up for my boss at work who dragged me to the blood donor place! But I still say you should be able to donate blood at Huddinge Hospital…
I’m getting really scared of the God of Joy right now! The last thing I need right now is more expenses! And that’s the only thing I seem to be getting! Most recently my desk that broke down in three pieces as I was changing around things in my living room. What I really can’t understand is everyone who says “more money, more problems”!? How is that possible!? I don’t see how getting more money can give you more problems! Perhaps different problems like “geez, where am I gonna spend all my money today” or “do you mean I actually have to drive myself today”! So let’s end this little update with something I’m pretty good at – a quote:
I believe the struggle for financial freedom is unfair
I believe the only ones who disagree are millionaires.
– Savage Garden, “Affirmation”
Remember that God of Joy I was so upset with last week? Well, I must have done something worse than just owe him/her money, must have slept with his/her wife/husband or something really bad to piss him/her off (notice how very PC I am!). Just as I was getting my economy back together after the past two months ups’n’downs, including repairing my car for $270, and I was just starting to plan my X-mas budget when B A M! down comes a bill from Shell wanting $950 from me for parking fees – from June and July! Hello, it’s December now!!! I am really, really sorry God of Joy, for whatever it is I may have done to piss you off, please! Let me enjoy X-mas atleast!!!!
There must be a God somewhere, let’s call it the “God of Joy”. I must owe that f*cker money in a previous life or something! After last weekend when everything was going against me and I just said “to hell with it” I started the project of upgrading my computer at home. And yesterday when everything (except the new harddrive) was in place I enjoyed the most incredible gaming computer I’ve ever had! For the first time I was able to run a really graphics heavy game totally maxed out without any problems. Me = happy! This mornig, I got up and was still happy. Got to work, still happy. And then the “God of Joy” said “that’s it!” and decided to ruin everything, and the mechanic called me and said “repairs on your car will cost about $250″… me = not happy! Why, why oh dear God of Joy won’t you let me be happy for one continuos day! Please!!!
Or another example – took the train this morning (since my car is in the shop) and saw a very, very pretty woman on the train (who I really hope isn’t reading this). Usually I would just think to myself “nice :)” and that’d be it. But oh no, I had to notice that she had something that appeared to be an Adam’s apple, and all of a sudden I remember this “women don’t have Adam’s apples”-comment from Friends. But this one did, noway she was now or have ever been a guy, way too pretty for that. But it still ruined the entire trip for me.